I don't see why we should outlaw this. There's so many potential insights to be gleaned from research like this that you just can't predict.

And making something like this illegal often has unintended side effects. What if brain organoid research is what ends up curing alzheimer's?

Advocating for outlawing parts of research just on the basis that in the future they could potentially turn unethical is very shortsighted in my opinion.

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bondarchuk an hour ago | parent [-]

Sure, and you could say the same thing about unit 731. The argument is not that it is inconceivable that there are benefits, but that they should be weighed against the drawbacks, which you don't mention at all.

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kunai 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

I want to be clear: I hate this. I hate everything about it. HOWEVER...

If you want to argue against wetware then we need a better argument than this. The same ideas were used to argue against stem cell research, IVF, and many other treatments and ideas that have saved and helped lives. Unit 731 isn't an apt comparison because cells are not inherently sentient to our knowledge. If they were it would absolutely shatter the profession of medical ethics as we know it.

	▲	bondarchuk 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I honestly don't know if better arguments are needed. I think most people simply have no idea that this research is happening right now, and if they did the vast majority would be against it. Feels fundamentally different from stem cell or IVF. We know that human brain cells in sufficiently large and complex assemblages are sentient (I don't know if the word "inherently" has any purpose here). We know this research aims at making the assemblages larger and more complex. It's a fundamentally different kind of argument IMO compared to those against e.g. stem cells or IVF. (Slight aside but did you know that they're also doing tests on whole human brains taken from corpses, and they give them tranquilizers "just to be sure"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212992)
	▲	lo_zamoyski 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> The same ideas were used to argue against stem cell research, IVF, and many other treatments and ideas that have saved and helped lives. You write as if objections to (certain kinds of) stem cell research, IVF, etc. have been roundly defeated in some way simply because they've "saved and helped lives". This is naked utilitarianism and I hope I don't have to rehearse the reasons why utilitarianism fails utterly as moral theory.